I am not that good

The World of Warcraft Shadowlands expansion is doing very well.  Blizzard has confirmed that subscriptions are higher now than they have been in many years, and the general reception for the expansion has been positive compared to other expansions.  The numbers bear this out too - Normal and Heroic raiding participation is way up, and vastly more guilds are killing bosses now than were doing so in the last couple expansions.  It isn't just raiding though, as participation in all endgame content has gone way up in terms of raw numbers.

There is one place where the numbers are lower though, and that is the peak of raiding challenge, Mythic difficulty.  Numbers are down compared to last expansion, and I am confident they will get much worse as time goes on.

The reason for this is the lack of a power grind in Shadowlands.  In previous xpacs people got more powerful just by playing a lot and this let them overcome challenges by virtue of slow power inflation.  Shadowlands has little in the way of power inflation compared to earlier times, and this means that guilds are struggling to make the numbers checks in Mythic raiding.  I talked about this earlier when the first guilds were killing Mythic bosses, and now the numbers have borne out my projections.  The top guilds are still able to clear raids in a couple weeks just like before, but middling guilds like mine are struggling.  We are used to slow power inflation letting us beat content eventually, but with no more power inflation on the horizon we are going to have huge problems beating the harder bosses.

Currently we have downed 4 Mythic bosses.  We will get more so long as we keep at it, but the struggle is going to be real.  It is especially difficult because these folks are used to a progression pattern where they beat all the stuff, just not that quickly.  Perfectly fine for people who raid 6 hours a week and are fairly relaxed about it.  A shift into being a guild that doesn't beat all the stuff will be tough to swallow, even if it is due to larger trends that have little to do with how we play.  Just because other guilds are having the same struggles doesn't mean we are going to be happy about this.

I like the raiding I am doing, and I intend to keep blasting away at it.  If we don't kill all the stuff I am totally okay with that.  I like practicing and playing on challenging content and eventually getting some kills, but I am not especially hung up on any particular goal.  This isn't a big problem for me personally.

Still, I don't quite know how to feel about it.  Not having the pressure to constantly grind away to get those incremental benefits is a positive, but I actually love the overall system of gradual improvements in numbers combining with gradual improvements in execution leading to victories.  I am glad to not have that feelings that I have to play all the time doing stuff that is boring... but getting brick walled with no way to progress out of it is not great.

The biggest advantage to gradual power inflation is the social flexibility it grants you.  If you get stopped by a boss you can't quite do enough damage to beat, you can either boot weaker players from your group to get past it, or you can wait until inflation gets you over the hump.  Being able to keep playing with people who are fun to play with but who aren't quite there in terms of numbers is great.  In the scenario where we stop progressing in terms of numbers we may well end up in a spot where we either have to accept that we can no longer accomplish new goals or be super mercenary about who plays with us.  

Both of those options suck.  I don't want to boot good people over 5% performance.  I also don't want to just stop having new things to do.

This isn't some theoretical thing either.  Right now I have item level 222.  I am going to hit a hard cap at 226, and likely won't quite make it there.  That is, I can expect to do 5% more damage from gear eventually.  There is nothing else that will improve my abilities.  If we are 6% off from killing a boss, that boss isn't going to die.  We have finished all the grinds the game has offered us, and I don't think it is enough.

I don't want another infinite grind where I am offered the chance to play 14 hours a day slowly getting a number bigger.  Yuck.  I just want a thing I can do every week to get myself something quite small.  Just 1% more output would be plenty, since that means by the time new content arrives I will be doing 12% more than I am right now, which should be sufficient to beat the entire raid.

People like slowly getting to their goals.  They like seeing new things, and constant, gradual progress.  We are happiest not when we get it all at once, nor when we get nothing, but rather when we get a string of victories over time.  Now it just remains for Blizzard to make that happen.

Giving away loot

In the WOW Shadowlands expansion loot is contentious.  Blizzard decided to dramatically cut back the loot awarded in this xpac, and while I am generally happy with the new pace the changes have not been particularly popular.  The major complaint from where I sit is that by far the best way for me to get better gear was to do pvp.

I don't like pvp much, especially serious pvp.

But I do like being the best I can be for when I am doing raiding and dungeons, so I did some pvp to get gear.  A system where players who want to be optimal absolutely have to play one game mode in order to get loot for other games modes (which do drop loot of their own, just not enough) is flawed.  I think there should be benefits for people who do multiple types of content at a high level, but each content mode needs its own comparable advancement path.

Some numbers.  First, everyone gets loot two ways.  First, you can get loot as you do content during the week.  Second, you can get loot in your vault at the start of each new week.  The vault has many options, but you can only get one item from it no matter how much content you do.  Doing more content just gets you more choice.  

Imagine you are a Heroic raiding type of person.  Your raids drop item level 213 gear, and your weekly vault awards 213 gear.  If you did pvp at a similar level you get 213 gear during the week, and 213 options in your vault.  So far, so good.

However, that same person is probably doing dungeons at level 12, which gives them 203 loot from each dungeon, and 220 loot in their vault.

This leads to some bizarre situations.  If you are doing level 12 dungeons you probably don't need level 203 gear, it is already obsolete.  As such, dungeons don't give you anything except a shot at much superior gear at the end of the week.  This doesn't fit with the other modes, but I do understand where it came from.  Dungeons can be run over and over, and if they awarded 213 gear from every level 12 dungeon, it would be too easy to fully gear up.

This also means that everyone has to do dungeons because it gives the absolute best stuff in the vault.  That is, this happens up to a point.  Gear caps out at 226, but from raids and pvp you can get 226 both in the vault and from doing content.  Dungeon gear caps at 226 from the vault, but the stuff from every dungeon caps at 210.  Once you reach this cap you are stuck, and running dungeons no longer awards loot that matters.  That isn't good, and it meant that people like me ended up doing pvp because no matter how good I am at dungeons, the loot is trash and if I want to be my best self I should go do pvp so I can raid and do dungeons.

I hate being shovelled into content I don't like in order to do content I do like.  I could just ignore it of couse, but the fact is that my gear makes a huge difference to which groups I can get into and what things I can do.  Sitting and waiting for the vault each week when I could be improving myself is not how I want to play.

Blizzard has developed a solution for this.  It is a bit kludgy, but it does address the problem to some extent.  Their idea is that you will be able to get badges in dungeons, and you trade in those badges to upgrade your dungeon loot.  At the top level you will be able to upgrade loot to 220.  This is worse than pvp and raiding, but it is a big improvement over what we had before.

Trouble is, 220 is still less than 226, which means dungeon loot is going to be worse than everything else.  This grants an upgrade path for dungeoneers, which I like, but I don't see a reason for it to stop short.  Dungeons scale infinitely, so at the highest levels they are monstrously difficult.  Raiding at the highest level is hard, but a level 30 dungeon is actually impossible.  You can pick some dungeon level below that which is ludicrously difficult and gate the gear behind that.  There is no worry about giving it away too easily.

There is one catch though.  When you are getting gear from raids, that gear is random.  Most of the time it has fixed stats, but every so often you get a piece that has an extra on it.  These bonus abilities don't increase damage or healing directly, but they help a bit.  However, since all the gear you get from raiding is random, if your Bracers of Beatdown drop, you put them on whether or not they have that extra bonus on them.  However, if you are running dungeons you can run a crapton of them looking for Pauldrons of Smacking that *also* have that extra bonus.  They will start at a low level, but then you can upgrade them to level 220.  This means that people upgrading dungeon gear will consistently have extra bonuses on their gear, so it is a little better than the level 220 it appears.

That extra bonus isn't enough.  To give a proper comparison, if you were in full 220 gear with every piece with a small bonus, and someone else was in full 226 gear with no bonuses, the 226 character does about 9% more damage and has 6% more health.

The 220 character gets to move 20% faster, regain 10% of their damage dealt as healing, and negate 12% of all area of effect damage they take.  The 226 character is better, and realistically they will get some extra bonuses on their gear, just not as many, but those extra things make quite a difference.  Of course an actual character is going to have a mix of those things, but this gives some context for what kind of tradeoff we are making.

Other people mostly scoff at extra bonuses on gear.  They don't care much about regaining health or speed.  I like those extra bonuses a lot!  I love being fast, and a lot of the time I would happily trade 6 levels on my gear for an additional 5% movement speed.  I know I am in the minority in this, but I am confident in my calculation.

People ignore things like speed because it doesn't show up in a simulator.

But in simulators you always live to the end of the fight, and in real game play being slow means you die to stupid stuff sometimes.

In any case, much as I might nitpick this, it is at least a step in the right direction.  Letting everyone play their own form of content and get geared up doing so is a great goal, and I don't mind at all if doing multiple forms gives an edge - I just want that edge to be smaller than it is.